Blood and gore

Right now I'm at Duke, being a dork and doing math during the summer. The whole end of the semester, beginning of the summer period has been pretty non-stop, and it's not going to ease up any. When this is over, I'll have one day at home before leaving for Germany and six weeks of 'study' abroad. But, before I left W&M, my friend and I didn't have anything better to do one evening, so I made her watch Titus with me. (The movie, not the play. Although I have no doubt that watching a book would be quite gripping, if you're in to that sort of thing.)

The play Titus Andronicus was written by Shakespeare, but in recent years, Julie Taymor directed a big screen adaptation of it, which starred Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. The critics weren't too fond of it; in fact, it turns out that the critics aren't too fond of the original play, either. It's apparently viewed as the closest Shakespeare ever got to hack work, written to do nothing but please the crowd. As you might expect, it's got tons of blood. All kinds of body parts get cut off, people get baked into pastries... it's great. Sadly, most people today look at the horrific violence of the play and dismiss it as Shakespeare's shallowest work, making the claim that it's the lowest type of dramatic work: that degenerate play written merely to please the audience and make money.

That's something I'm not going to try to refute, because I'm not an English major, but people who hold this view of Titus Andronicus are, I think, missing the larger point. Every play Shakespeare wrote was intended merely to please the audience and make money; they were, after all, his job. The fact that he happened to be supremely gifted in writing plays with deep and powerful themes was just history's luck. Titus Andronicus may not be Shakespeare's most 'literary' work, but that doesn't mean that it's wholly without merit. As with all his plays, there's quite a lot to recommend it besides the bloody plot, from memorable, well-developed characters to the witty dialogue.

I have a hard time understanding Shakespeare purists; people who insist on re-enacting his plays in Elizabethean garb are, I think, forgetting that his plays are entertainment in the same way that Hollywood films are entertainment. They are not holy writ, and they are meant to dazzle, shock, and surprise.

In the case of Titus Andronicus, I think that the generally negative feeling towards it that I have seen among critics is misplaced. When you get down to brass tacks, the direction is fantastic, the reinterpretation of the setting is quirky and interesting, and every single actor across the board has an outstanding grasp of the material. Two thumbs up.

And all of that aside, Aaron gets the best line in any play ever: "Villian, I have done thy mother."

Complete text of Titus Andronicus, courtesy of Project Gutenberg

Star Wars: The Next One

Episode III is reviewed at Bigfanboy.com. Verdict? Better than the first two, still not great.

This is actually heartening news. If Lucas is able to continue this linear improvement, then the 4th, 5th, and 6th movies should be pretty amazing. Oh, wait.

I can't make fun, though. I already know I'm going to shell out my seven bucks and see it in the theatre as soon as it comes out.

By the way

One site that I've been linking to quite frequently is Wikipedia, and I'd just like to point out what an amazing place it is. If you haven't checked it out yet, you ought to. The idea is that it's an encyclopedia, but absolutely anyone can get on there and edit an article, or create a new article. In spite of the sincere efforts of some people determined to wreck the experience, the whole thing works incredibly well. Just go here and start reading, it's crazy what you run across.

Also, a day or two ago I mentioned Technorati, which is a pretty neat site. The idea there is to keep track of blogs and rate which are the most influential by counting the number of other pages that link to any given blog. It's the same idea as citation analysis to determine the influence of a scientific paper, or Google's PageRank thing, but for blogs. A site like Gizmodo is way up on the list because all kinds of people read it and then link back to it, whereas my poor site is at the bottom of the pile. Will you be my friend?

Merit-based economies and Schoenberg

A few days ago I mentioned reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and said it was good and fun and all, but not outstanding. Well, it's been turning over in my mind, and the more I think about it the more appealing I find his whole idea of a merit-based economy. I've got no idea if this is something that other people have written about previously or what, but Doctorow sets his story in a society that no longer uses money; science has advanced to the point where all the necessities of life are essentially free for the taking. A person's 'worth,' in this society, is determined by the amount of respect others have for them. Read about it here.

What got me thinking about this was Arnold Schoeberg, whom we've been studying in my music history class. Schoenberg was the first composer to develop any kind of coherent system for writing atonal music. Now, the phrase 'systemetized atonal music' is kind of misleading, because it makes it sound like such music would have an audible, coherent structure, which isn't the case. Schoenberg spent some time before he developed his system, called serialism, writing atonal music without any particular blueprint. His suite Pierrot Lunaire is probably the most famous example of this. His efforts to devise a system for writing atonal music that didn't rely on an external text for structure ultimately led to his creation of serialism.

Serialism, or the twelve-tone system, was a method that allowed Schoeberg to compose pieces that were completely atonal, yet still afforded the composer a framework in which to organize a work. Serialistic compositions are masterpieces of mathematical precision, rife with clever juxtapositions and inversion of lines, and absolutely unintelligible when listened to. In order to understand a twelve-tone piece on even the most basic level, you have to sit down with the score and analyze it. In fact, there's really not much of a point in listening to the piece in the first place, because it's not going to help you understand what's going on, and you certainly won't enjoy it.

Schoenberg's earlier atonal pieces frequently sound like a group of instruments playing more or less random notes in no particular rhythm. His later serialistic pieces, which are possessed of an incredibly stringent, erudite structure, also sound like a group of instruments playing random notes in no particular rhythm. Interestingly, you can play one piece from each period of Schoenberg's career to a trained musician or composer, and nine times out of ten they won't be able to tell if the piece is serialistic or not.

The point is that Schoeberg created a system by which all the humanity could be removed from the process of writing 'music;' but the end result was not really art, rather, it was nothing more than intellectual masturbation. Schoenberg claimed his music was a natural extension of the development of music, and so wrote his first serialistic piece, a piano suite, based on traditional classical forms. What to him was a way of fitting his work in with the great masterpieces of the past to me seems like an attempt to legitimize something that can barely be called music.

But, what thinking about Doctorow's book got me to realize is that, although my opinion about Schoenberg is shared by a schockingly large number of people, it's not the whole story. Clearly not everyone feels this way, since we still at least study Schoenberg, and the crucial factor for the man himself would have been if enough people considered his work meritorious for him to continue doing it. It doesn't matter so much that I happen to think his music is crap; there are people who find it richly rewarding, and on the basis of their opinion his work has some merit. So, moral of the story is that Daniel learned to be more open-minded.

It strikes me as kind of funny that even today, artists and scientists, the people who move society forward, are following something like this merit based system; few of them are well-paid, but they continue to do their work because they're inspired to do so and because of the respect it earns them among their peers. Maybe one day the rest of us will catch up.

I think I lost my point halfway through the rant about Schoenberg. Sorry. Only one more final, thank god.

Wastin' away...

Saucy has an article on making a good margarita- not the frozen kind, but the real honest to god cocktail. I actually agree with all the points he makes, and I'm a pretentious stuffy liquor snob, so check it out and learn how to get away from the syrupy sweet concoctions that Ruby Tuesday's has been feeding you all these years.

Hey Look

The Modern Word has an interview with the guy who's translating Umberto Eco's new novel. AND the New Yorker has the whole damn first chapter! I'm excited.

Umberto Eco is a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna. He's also an extremely good writer. The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, and Baudolino have all been penned by his hand. If you want to read one of his books, Baudolino would probably be a good place to start because it's funny and easy to understand (on one level) while retaining the depth and subtlety of his other novels.

Not everyone likes Eco, and some accuse him, perhaps rightly so, of intellectual grandstanding. It's hard to argue that Foucault's Pendulum doesn't fall into this trap. Despite this, however, his books are extrememly interesting and rewarding reads. Plus, you just feel so damn proud of yourself for finishing one.

110,000 V Taser Canon

I'ma put one of these bad boys on the roof of my dorm. That'll keep those damn construction workers from starting up their noisy machinery at 8am.

Linked from Gizmodo

Down and Out

Just finished reading Cory Doctorow's novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. (Doctorow is a co-editor of Boing Boing, which Technorati has consistently rated as the most popular blog on the internet for some time.) Thought it was pretty decent, fun to read, well-imagined. It's a sci-fi story set in the fairly impending future, but definitely not a space-opera type deal. It's just a story about a guy who lives and works at Disney World, and about his life getting crapped up, and him trying to redeem himself. The story was good, definintely worth the time. Don't know that I'd pay money for it, but fortunately, you don't have to.